I really love Caleb Widogast as a character, so I'm really glad that The Mighty Nein (animated) didn't pull any punches with Caleb's backstory. Liam and Matt during the campaign kept trying to be clear about how bad it was and that there is a good reason Caleb feels like it would be dangerous and obscene to forgive himself. Restorative vs. punitive justice is a big theme in Campaign 2, and to seriously explore that topic you have to talk about people who have done seriously bad shit.
But the fandom immediately did what fandoms all do and put on blorbo glasses where all is forgiven from the get-go and The Character never did anything wrong nor can he do wrong and every interesting jagged corner is planed down into the exact same cute soft shaped doll as every other completely indistinguishable Sad White Man© character. Fanon textual Funko POPS with the same dead eyes and vaguely painted over same features. Most people simply did not seriously engage with the gravity of Caleb's actual backstory.
But The Mighty Nein has made it very hard to not engage with it. Episode 5 is one of the most viscerally intense and disturbing pieces of animation I've ever seen. It didn't cut away from anything. It didn't tone anything down. It didn't try to remove Caleb's agency and his desire to do what he did, even while also showing how deeply he was manipulated down that path. We just have to sit with the shocking and very uncomfortable reality of what happened to him and what he did. And that he's not shrugging away from that violence now, he just wants to turn it against the people he views as the real traitors to the Dwendalian Empire: Trent Ikithon and his Volstruckers.
Incarcerating him in a mental institution for a decade clearly didn't quell that rage or desire to act. If anything it just concentrated his desire to retaliate. That was never an effective method of "justice" in the text anymore than it's effective in our world. Although a LOT of social media is very big on forever punishing evildoers as some kind of righteous praxis no matter what politics they claim to value. It's a very ingrained mindset. People really hate if you ask if that vengeance-driven policy has any evidence-based research that shows it actually reduces crime and violence (it doesn't).
So I'm glad there are audience members both new to the story and Campaign 2 fans who are reacting with shock and having their opinion of Caleb challenged by having to really see what his story is in a way that's much harder to skim over and ignore. That was the actual point of the story to begin with, and it flew over so many viewers heads or they intentionally ducked it. But Caleb isn't actually Caleb if that part of him is just hand-waved away.
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